Earlier this month Shane Snow, Tech journalist and co-founder of @Contently, opened up a can of worms with his article “Hug vs. Handshake”. When he, a “married dude”, runs into a male acquaintance both in and outside the workplace, a handshake is an acceptable and preferable greeting for both men. But “with females, I feel like I’m trapped between two walls of a deep-space garbage compactor. On the first meeting, we shake hands. Easy. But the next time we cross paths? Is a handshake now too formal (especially if we got along well in the first meeting)? Will a hug be awkward?”

Jessica Roy, a reporter for Betabeat and the New York Observer, offers a different angle on this conundrum:

The problem with shaking hands, of course, is that you might fracture our brittle bones with your manly monster shake. But the problem with hugging is that you might accidentally touch our delicate lady areas. What’s a dude to do?

And Tim Sackett, a journalist at Ragan.com, summarises the whole debate in his (literally) bold words:

Women will hug anything.

What are we talking about here? Our desks? Coffee machines? A lion at the nearest zoo?!

Imagine a world where homosexuality is both natural and normal and heterosexuality is perceived and treated as a sinful aberration.

The award winning short film Love Is All You Need? powerfully depicts this world where “gay” is “straight” and “straight” is “gay” and a sexual relationship between a man and a woman is a cultural, social and religious taboo.

“Raise your hand!” It’s what we all have to do in order to grow our careers, gain new opportunities, and take on different experiences. Sometimes opportunities come to us without us doing anything, but most of the time, opportunities come across our plate because in someway or another, we raised our hands. We may have had a conversation about what we wanted to do with a mentor, or taken a class that seemed interesting, or directly said, ‘hey, I’m interested.’ Regardless, if we don’t raise our hands then we certainly won’t ever get selected for a new project, new job, or any new opportunities for growth. Read More »

“…when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;

…when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

its ideas transcend the turbulent times in which it was written. Civil rights historian Diane McWhorter notes that the original conflict “was between not good and evil, but good and normal.” The brute racism that strikes us today as mass social insanity Read More »

Having worked together with different generations, it’s obvious there are different styles of working and approaching situations. We heard a stat that by 2020, 50% of all US workers will be Millennials. Even for us it’s hard to believe that it is only 7 years away. What we wanted to explore today is with all these people coming into the workforce how can our managers / mentors in Cisco prepare themselves for these people. Read More »

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